Americans should view the U.S. press with almost as much distrust as Soviet citizens viewed theirs, because it's nearly as rotten as that; and we should have learned, from "Saddam's WMD," that this is so.

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The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. "news" media) has "reported" on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia's Vladimir Putin -- a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other mainstream "news" media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America's "news" media had previously focused on about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person's knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine's politics just can't be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That's the deeper truth -- and it's key to understanding the current situation there. And it's even more key to understanding the real situation here, inside the United States, as we shall see.)

So: by digging into an example, the rot in U.S. "news" media will be dissected here, and the truth in both Ukraine and the U.S. will be exposed here.

On 28 April 2014, NYRB's reporter Tim Judah headlined from Donetsk in the south, "Ukraine: Hate in Progress." He (falsely) analogized the opponents against that coup as being similar to the separatists in Yugoslavia whose ethnocentrism had produced the atrocities during the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia. Judah wrote:

"Talk to people manning the anti-government barricades and taking part in the demonstrations against Kiev [in the north] here, ... and one thing in particular is scary. After a day or two you realize that they all say more or less the same thing. 'We want to be listened to,' people say. The government in Kiev, which took power after the pro-European revolution there, is a 'fascist junta' backed by Europe and the US. It is as though the Russian media -- which is widely watched and read here -- has somehow embedded these messages into the heads of people and they have lost the ability to think for themselves. ... All that seems to be registering right now is a nationalist and hysterical drumbeat from Russia about the new Nazis of Kiev and their NATO masters. [Judah's article provides no evidence against that 'Nazis of Kiev' viewpont; he simply ignores it, as if it's not even worth checking out -- and he's supposed to be a 'reporter.' Instead, he goes immediately into his mere assumption that the rejectionists of the coup are the source of his alleged 'Hate in Progress.'] This is ominously reminiscent of what the Serbian media and other bits of the former Yugoslav media did when Yugoslavia collapsed. Then, Serbs were subjected to endless documentaries about Croatia's wartime fascists, whom they were told were coming back. Now the Russian media says the fascists have returned."

Judah had spent about ten days in Ukraine, to do that story.

By contrast, the website OpedNews is no such prestigious source of news and commentary as NYRB, and it's far less influential. On 16 March 2014, they published a report from George Eliason, an American who didn't spend only ten days in Ukraine, but who instead lives in southern Ukraine; and it was titled "The Nazis Even Hitler Was Afraid of." He provided a very different historical context, taken not falsely from Yugoslavian history and culture, but truly from Ukrainian history and culture (which is obviously far more relevant to the actual matter at hand here):

"Even though the German SS had units dedicated to genocide, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) approached this mission [from Hitler's SS] with a zeal and barbarity that Hitler's own units could not muster." Eliason noted that, "The atrocities at Babi Yar [in northern Ukraine], and the accompanying brutality, were left to SS Nachtigall and the polizei. Both were Banderite [north Ukrainian]. The reason was simple. The brutal work of genocide at this level made even hardened German SS uncomfortable." Eliason documented that the politicians whom the U.S. had placed into power in the February 2014 coup were "Banderite." He quoted "Dmitri Yarosh (Trizub and Pravy Sektor, and Assistant Secretary of Defense ... [in the U.S.-coup-imposed government]): 'It is better for us to build our own National[ist] State! Does that mean knives to the Moskals [Russian-speakers] and ropes to the Jews? Well, not so unsophisticated. There must be a Ukrainian authority in Ukraine; ... then forced Ukrainization. Russians do not like it? Well, go back to F#cking Russia! Those that don't want to go -- we can help them. Russians are not even Slavs. ... Next we will liberate our lands: Voronezh, Kursk, Belogorod Oblast, and Kuban. These are all Ukrainian lands!'" Eliason noted: "The only problem is all of these Oblasts (regions) are in Russia!" Eliason, who lives in southern Ukraine, reported the reality that the mere visitor, Judah, didn't so much as even mention. The intense and aggressive hatred ran in the opposite direction: not northwestward from Russia in the southeast (such as Judah supposed and alleged), but instead southeastward against Russian-speaking Ukrainians and against Russia itself.

Lest one get the false impression that Eliason might have been selectively quoting there, this is what Yulia Tymoshenko, Obama's preferred candidate to win the 25 May 2014 election (she lost; she was too rightwing for most Ukrainians to vote for as President), had said in a tapped phone conversation, leaked public on 24 March 2014: "We must grab arms and go whack those damn katsaps [a Ukrainian word used to refer to the Russians in a negative tone] together with their leader ... I'll use all my connections, I'll raise the whole world -- as soon as I'm able to -- in order to make sure. ... not even scorched earth won't remain where Russia stands. ... They must be killed with nuclear weapons."

Tymoshenko's ally, the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyski, masterminded the 2 May 2014 rounding-up and burning of Odessa's proponents of independence from the Kiev regime. This incineration was done inside Odessa's Trade Unions Building, and this roasting of more than 200 civilians there was the event that sparked Ukraine's civil war, because it made unequivocal the hate against them coming from the Obama-installed leaders in the northwest. (Kolomoyski himself lived in Switzerland, with his $6 billion heisted fortune.)

As the Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky has documented, the Obama Administration placed leading fascists, and even some overt neo-Nazis, at the top of the post-coup government.

Also as Chossudovsky showed June 1st, under the headline, "Ukraine's Kiev Regime is Not 'Officially' a Neo-Nazi Government," the National Guard of Ukraine now uses a slightly modified version of the Swastika, and the emblem of the Azov Battalion that was formed by Obama's junta-government to kill supporters of independence from Kiev, uses Hitler's SS insignia turned upside-down.

Why should residents of southeastern Ukraine (an area that never admired Hitler) not fear being ruled by the people that Obama imposed to rule Ukraine? The residents in that region are exposed to propaganda from both the east and the west, the north and the south. Americans, who are exposed only to our own nation's propaganda, won't know that Obama installed a fascist regime in Ukraine, but (after the May 2nd massacre) it's an established historical fact, and it's one known painfully well, first-hand, in southeastern Ukraine, no matter what America's "reporters," such as Tim Judah, say to blur or distract from it. The owners of America's major "news" media don't want us to know it -- and they hire and fire such "reporters," so that very few of us will (and so that even fewer of us will know why this was done).

It's not just "Saddam's WMD" that the U.S. major "news" media passed stenographically to the American public as "news reporting" from a lying White House. Nothing has basically changed; it's merely a different war, and a different President, that's all. But this one's against Russia, a much more potent target, and potentially far more catastrophic outcome for everyone. Done for only the international aristocrats, who enjoy "the great game."

Earlier, on 20 March 2014, NYRB had headlined, "Fascism, Russia and Ukraine," and Timothy Snyder wrote: "Putin wants Ukraine in his Eurasian Union, which means that Ukraine must be authoritarian, which means that the Maidan must be crushed. ... Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this." Unfortunately, what is "wrong with this" is the lying U.S. "news" media, including Timothy Snyder and NYRB.

Unfortunately, Ukrainians really do have only a choice between being ruled as one nation by Obama's (and the IMF's) fascists, or else splitting in two with the other part being instead allied with Putin's nascent Eurasian Union. Even if that's a bad choice to need to make, it's the real one and they've made it; and pretending otherwise is pure propaganda, not news-coverage at all. After all, Obama himself installed the neo-Nazis into power in Kiev. His fascism is therefore clear (especially after the May 2nd massacre by Obama's chosen leaders of Ukraine). And the intent of the people whom he has installed, to kill the people in Ukraine's southeast who had overwhelmingly elected Yanukovych and who don't accept the coup that overthrew this democratically elected (though like all Ukrainian Presidents, corrupt) leader, cannot produce a peaceful Ukraine. A month after the February 2014 coup, even Germany's anti-Russian Der Spiegel reported, with regret, that, "In the eastern part of Ukraine, with several large cities including Donetsk, Kharkiv and Dnepropetrovsk, polls show three-quarters of those surveyed rejecting the popular revolt in Kiev." The residents there had good reason to reject it -- and that German report was published on March 17th, six weeks before the May 2nd massacre, after which such anti-coup sentiments in Ukraine's south and east would only have greatly increased.

This isn't to say anything about Yanukovych, nor even about Putin. It's only to say that Obama really did force the people of Ukraine's southeast to terminate rule from Kiev. That might not have been Obama's intention (if he was so stupid as not to know better, which is highly unlikely), but it's what he in fact did, and there can be no doubt whatsoever about this. And all the lying in the world won't change that fact, even if it will, tragically, deceive the American public, about it, and about the important history that's now being made there.

Whereas in 2003, Saddam Hussein was used as a fake foil for the threat from Al Qaeda which had really attacked the U.S., this time the southeast Ukrainians are being used as a fake foil for an alleged "threat" from "Vladimir Putin," who has not. (And they are innocent of any other "crime" than wanting to live in peace from neo-Nazis who want them dead.)

The best advice when considering the U.S. press is: Consider it to be propaganda, not basically different from the "news" media in other corrupt countries. This should be obvious to Americans after we invaded Iraq on false pretenses on 19 March 2003. Some people might believe Russia to be more corrupt than the U.S. (and it's rated around 110 of 148 countries, whereas the U.S. is rated around 35; Ukraine is rated around 140). However, when Russia's first Prime Minister (1991-1998), Boris Yeltsin, privatized Russian industry, he reached out to the U.S. for guidance on how to do that, and Lawrence Summers and Harvard's economics department got the assignment and basically taught Yeltsin's people what to do and even carried out much of it themselves; and its top economist, the Summers protege (just as Summers had been Martin Feldstein's protege when both of those men designed Ronald Reagan's economics policies) Andrei Shleifer and his friends siphoned off millions for themselves, while handing out billions to their chosen Russian insiders to become Russia's oligarchs. So, it's hard to say: perhaps the U.S. didn't teach corruption well to Russia, or perhaps the U.S. taught it too well there. But, since Ukraine is the most corrupt country in the entire former Soviet Union, maybe Harvard's economics department can learn from that even-more-advanced model. (Or is it simply a more blatant model? Maybe the U.S. isn't less corrupt, just more sophisticated about its corruption. One won't likely find the answer to such a question by reading major "news" media, nor papers from Harvard's economics department. It's not the kind of thing that America's -- or any -- aristocracy would want the public to understand. Perhaps Summers and Feldstein have taught about it here and here. They're on the member-list both years. And so is Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, the woman who had told Ukraine's junta-government to keep Ukraine together or else the loan-spigot from them would be terminated. She too was there at the meeting on 29 May through 1 June 2014, as well as at the 2013 meeting.)

And isn't this just the killer? How can anybody read that and not be disabused of The Big Lie? (And on those member-lists just linked-to, each of the two years, did you notice that both Henry Kravis and his wife also attended -- both years? As well as the former general, now head of the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Global Institute, David Petraeus, the invader of Iraq, which was another very profitable enterprise -- and he, too, attended both years? So, when Victoria Nuland said, just months before the coup that overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President, that U.S. taxpayers had invested over $5 billion to bring about "democracy" to Ukraine, why didn't she mention for whom we had invested that money, which brought about this coup?)

Even if America's "news reporting" isn't much good as history, it's masterful as hypocrisy. For propaganda, America really is Number One. We even fooled Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. But unfortunately, the "we" there is America's aristocracy -- not us. The "us" just fight (and kill, and die) in their wars. Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand." In Italy and some other countries, it's more commonly known as "the Black Hand." However, at the level of the international aristocracy, it's just their hand, and it has always been a winning hand. They may fight against each other, but they are remarkably united against us. And, thus, naturally, they don't want us to know about it. Why would they? They and the people who pay them own practically everything. And, "At the Top, Everybody Knows Everybody."

It's no different in Ukraine.

Only fools believe the cover-story. And the few aristocrats need lots of fools -- and get them.

It's just the way things are, and have always been. The "invisible hand" has always been the hand of the aristocracy. Unfortunately, Gorbachev and Yeltsin hadn't figured that out. But, of course, lots of people haven't.

The great men who founded the United Sates of America feared this outcome for the country they were creating; it terrified and obsessed them, and they did all they could to prevent it from happening here. Unfortunately, even they were not able to figure out a way to avoid it.

So, here we are. But at least we can now knowingly make the choice of whether or not to remain as fools. At least that much is now within our power.

So, please pass this along: In the U.S. at least, it's samizdat literature. The only way it'll become known is if people pass it along. It's one thing that each of us can do to say, by action, not words -- to say, this way: no more. It's a choice that each reader of this can make, for himself or herself. This much, is freedom. Let's make the most of it.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Authors Bio:
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.